Dota 2

I saw the previous DOTA 2 thread and felt like doing some compiling of information, and to also make it a more informative thread for those who don't know much about dota.

Dota (Defense of the Ancients) is the more famous of the original MOBA (Multiplayer online battle arena) based custom maps. Aeon of Strife being its SC:2 predecessor. DOTA is simply that, a custom game for an RTS where it's 3 lanes, 5v5 with neutral creeps spawning every minute. It came to popularity in WarCraft 3: The Frozen Throne when IceFrog made DOTA Allstars, a revamp of Guinsoo's map. People would literally buy WC3 just to play this custom map.

From there the genre went in two directions: League of Legends (LoL) and Heroes of Newerth (HoN). LoL was completely free to play at its inception, and was a much more "noob" friendly game. HoN on the other hand was much more in keeping to the style of DOTA and was considered a much more competitive game, but was in many ways counter-intuitive.

DOTA 2 is the repackaging of DOTA 1 but with all of the needed fixes that HoN and LoL introduced. Put together by the large scale Valve Corporarion (Steam/Half-Life), it has the developer support so necessary in keeping these types of games up to date with a competitive player base (new heroes/items/balancing). It's based on a completely different engine than the original of course and is quite a good looking game.

MOBA's are becoming more and more popular due to the very active style of game play, equaling the amount of attention/skill of many fps's, and the relatively low time it takes to have the full experience (games lasting no more than 30-60 minutes on average). With Riot's LoL being the highest grossing game out right now (or so I've heard), bringing in more money than games such as World of Warcraft with are subscription based, these games are in high demand. This may be why companies such a Blizzard and Valve are hoping on the band wagon. The great thing about these games though is that there truly is no cost to play them, and all the things one can buy in game are purely aesthetic, visual modifications to hero skins or alternate announcer voices. If one is skilled at the game, one has no need to invest any money into it to stay competitive or enjoy it.

DOTA 2 is currently in beta, and you can head on over to Steam, fill out the survey and get into the beta. I believe they just added some servers in today's patch, and a buddy of mine just got his invite today, I don't know if one is the cause of the other but there may be some correlation. Also, you can scour forums who have been given numerous beta keys and enter their private giveaways separate from relying on Valve.

ITT I would like to compile a list of all current DOTA 2 Beta players, so please post the following:

DOTA/MOBA Expirience. For example I played Aeons of Strife, which was predota, and was an avid dota player, and ever more so in Allstars. I never really touched LoL, but played HoN almost the moment it went into closed beta, and I swear it felt like that game was in beta for 2 years.

Favorite Hero

If I've forgotten anything, please feel free to let me know so I can include it, thanks for reading.

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

I'm compiling this list from various sources, if you find that you're already on the list and DO NOT WANT TO BE, please message me.

That being said, DOTA 2 brings me back to the good ole' days of the team based moba, what has happened in HoN with heroes such as Amun Ra' is much like what happened when Mortred got Battle Fury and Black King Bar in DOTA 1, the game ended and she won. Carries can only seem to do so much in DOTA 2 at this point, and early pushes get shut down and countered hard. This of course is why it is so very important to play with people in coordination, and much more than that, to play with people who have some idea of what they're doing. I'd like to get as many people playing together as possible, if you don't already have something equivalent to such things as skype/teamspeak/ventrilo, I highly suggest you look into it.

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

Here are some of the mechanical issues I feel Valve needs to address before release:

Orb effects: Much like in HoN, you should have a tooltip area with which you can chose which orb you want to use, this would do 2 things: Allow advanced players to orb walk, as well as allow players who say, want MoM and Desolator: Mask for Ms/As and deso for Armor pen and damage.

Placing wards: there should be less places where wards are unallowed. For example the dire ancient forest elevated ledge near the ramp down to teir 3 tower. This was a HUGE ward in HoN and DOTA 2 should make use of this spot

Individual unit distinction and cursor accuracy. Right now I feel, especially when there are many small units such as enigma's spawns, it can be at times impossible to indiviually select the unit you want. The cursor is too bulky, it needs to be slimmed way down and be more pinpoint accurate, it also needs some level of transparency. In general I think the interface needs to be cleaned up.

An in game modification manager. I truly hope valve allows mods to be introduced into the game interface, much like in HoN I wish to use a mini ui, one that cuts away all the useless interface clutter, such as the entirety of the unclickable bottom bar and replaces it with actual game terrain allowing a player to ostensibly "see more", or at least give one the impression of it.

Concede system. Leaver system. Vote Kick. Vote pause. These things are key, HoN and LoL both had implemented concede systems. I completely understand why they may not want them in beta specifically, it forces the game to go on to its full duration, which gives them vital beta data such as late game item balance, etc. Knowing HoN player, many of which are soon to be DOTA 2 players, if at 15 things weren't going well, they would concede. Realistically? If the game had gone its full duration, they would have possibly won. One of the great things about dota is "the comeback". Sometimes though, a game is so far gone that a comeback is nothing more than a pipe dream. This is something that really is a stylistic and game play choice on the dev's part. Unlike these other critiques, I cannot objectively say this change would improve the game, it's simply something I find myself wanting.

Linear Skill Up That is to say keeping the skill up horizontal with the skill up button. HoN players will know what I mean, just above the debuffs to keep things clean. I think moving horizontally makes more sense than down.

Hero Swap: Especially in single draft game modes, the ability to switch heroes with one another while still being limited to the random hero pools is a very important feature.

Hot Key Redundancy: Much like the way it was implemented in HoN, when you use a skill, such as puck's orb, in order to teleport to that orb you simply hit the exact same hotkey again. As it is in DOTA 2 there can be as many as 6 different hotkeys one must one, when in HoN, identical characters could be done with 3-4 at max. This I would say is one of the biggest changes they need to make.

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

Just got my beta invite about a week a go, down to play with anyone. Been playing on and off for a while, I played some of the original dotas before frozen throne was out. Started getting into it a little more seriously around 2007, my favorite hero is Naix.

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

No I must DOTA. You playin right now? I woke up quite late after that session last night, twas fun but alas it was after the dining halls closed, and uncooked ramen is just so damn unappealing. By the way I like the name

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

Yea I only added that banner to emphasize the mood of the game development community as getting more and more interested in MOBA style games. Yea I tried some of the other dota style sc2 maps, all of them were absolute garbage. I postulate that why blizzard is so currently embattled with valve over the DOTA name is precisely because they understand brand appeal and want to reap the profits of the dota name. To be more precise , I had heard rumors a while back that blizzard was thinking about possibly charging people for access to certain custom maps created by them. Obviously in this arena blizzard isn't going to be able to create a superior product, as such is the case with the clunky looking "blizzard dota". But, after seeing people continue to play and even buy new WC3:TFT just for dota, maybe they see it as a way to strengthen sc2?

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

It seems like they're probably embarrassed they missed the boat on dota 2. A new genre based on their game... and they're not even the ones to go big with it, now they're trying to play catchup via lawsuits and blizzard dota. They're way too far behind though imo

Yea they really are. They were way behind when they let Riot/HoN take the MOBA concept, something that originated from 2 of their individual IP's, (sc/wc), and make it into the most profitable game out there known as LoL.

In other news, I've had the worst teams humanly imaginable today. I know there is an inherent elo/mmr/ranking system behind it all which we don't have access to in the beta, and I swear for the level of player I am, I'm not being placed properly. Every game is feeders and leavers, I'm literally the only one left 1v5...

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

Lol yea, that my first time in dota 2 as puck, her orb is slow as balllls. So is her aa. Smashed them though considering how ****ing bad those kids were.

BRBRBR HUE HUE HUE... I hate playing with Brazilians, rice harder than Koreans. Worst is it's obviously time to counter or something and off the forest they go, preventing us from pushing, then get ganked when other team is up....

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

Yea, if you're good at one moba, chances are you'll be halfway decent at others of the genre, and even though LoL is arguably the least formulaic of the mobas, skills such as last hitting are across the board. At the Dota 2 Invitational, professional HoN teams were smashing professional dota clubs.

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

Lol yea, that my first time in dota 2 as puck, her orb is slow as balllls. So is her aa. Smashed them though considering how ****ing bad those kids were.

BRBRBR HUE HUE HUE... I hate playing with Brazilians, rice harder than Koreans. Worst is it's obviously time to counter or something and off the forest they go, preventing us from pushing, then get ganked when other team is up....

puck is a complete pile of **** unless you can get backup in AoE format. definitely not as strong as bubbles in HoN.

if you can play hon you can play this, although dota 2 is more based on farming up rather than ganking for gold/levels.

puke is a complete pile of **** unless you can get backup in AoE format. definitely not as strong as bubbles in HoN.

if you can play hon you can play this, although dota 2 is more based on farming up rather than ganking for gold/levels.

and i have been playing dota since like...2002?

Steam info? I think if you get a PK/Blink dagger on her she's decent enough, just that orb moves sooo slow, like 10x slower than shadow demon's waves which are still easily dodgeable.

From what I've seen, dota 2 is 100% about pushing, and if you're being pushed on, countering and turtling till carries get critical mass. I've seen so many game where my whole team is on dominating streaks, but can't stop them from raxxing/pushing.

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

Im on radiant with lock mid, and I own bm. AA does alright top with spectre, and bot is clock and vs and they're both 0-7+ by 10 minutes in, feeding the WD and CM soooo hard. Game's like ****ing over and we turtle. Come the 45 minute mark, the dagon I bought to **** around with is one shotting cm/wd. We come back and win. The game was the oddest one ever, score was like 2-30....

Rapier7: Freeing the slaves was the fallback reasoning when the mounting casualties made "saving the Union" morally inadequate. I wouldn't call Lincoln vindicated. I'd just say the outcome was better than what we expected, hopefully.

ive had games like that where we have no carry and end up turtling up and winning. had one where i was sven and said screw it and build treds, bkb, MoM, burriza, ****ty crit sword and cuirass. was able to crit with gods strength for 2.3 k cleaving all that ****. we did 1 counter push and they all bought back and i literally 2 shot their team in a nigma ult. i hate playing sven like that but it was hilarious.

the fact that you can stack crit items in dota always kind of irked me. i know it isnt truely stacking but if you double crit it does stupid damage